Month: December 2005

The Microsoft patterns & practices Smart Client Team has released the December 2005 release of the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) Hands on Labs (HOL). You can get the labs here. If you aren not familiar with the CAB, here is a description from the gotdotnet site: “Are you considering a Smart Client approach to address the challenges…

An update to the Web Project Conversion Wizard found in the final release of Visual Studio 2005 (all versions) and Visual Web Developer 2005 is now available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7CECD652-FC04-4EF8-A28A-25C5006677D8&displaylang=en The Web Project Conversion Wizard in Visual Studio 2005 has been updated to handle newly discovered conversion issues. This update will improve the success rate of…

Looking for this poster? Download the new SQL Server 2005 System Views Poster in PDF format from here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/d/f/0dfe488e-a335-4480-8a8a-b405e32f4368/SQL2005_Sys_Views.pdf –Darryl

I was doing my periodic “blog catch up” this morning and came across a few announcements about the latest drop of ASP.NET “Atlas.” There’s been quite a bit of rework, but I’ll let you go to the source (Brian, Nikhil, and Scott) for all the details. This release has better integration with existing ASP.NET server controls…

The latest WinFX CTP is available for download. What’s the coolest part of this CTP? Well, have you been using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and saying to yourself “This XAML stuff is pretty neat, but do I really have to build my UI by writing markup by hand?” There is a nice little surprise in…

Are you a web designer or a developer interested in design? Well there’s an ASP.NET section on MSDN just for you. The ASP.NET for Designers section is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/design/default.aspx. There’s a nice set of design templates that have been added to this section. Here’s a description from the site: “Download these professionally designed Starter Kits…

A few folks have already blogged about it, but in case you haven’t heard… MIX ’06 is a conference focused on web developers and designers. The conference will be in Vegas from March 20-22. You can find out more about MIX 06 at http://www.mix06.com/. The direct link to registration is https://register.mix06.com/RegistrationSelect.asp. -Marc

In the latest edition of MSDN TV, Don Box and Chris Anderson give new meaning to building mission critical apps :-). In this episode, “Special Holiday Episode III: Connecting People, Programs and Devices Using WinFX” they have fun geeking out with WinFX at Don’s house. You might want to turn the volume down towards the…

We’ve launched some free e-learning that focuses on ‘Upgrading from VB6’ and ‘ASP.NET 2.0’. There’s a short window on this…the code will in fact expire on Jan 5th, 2006. You can find more details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/learning/elearning_promo/ -Darryl

I’ve always claimed, in my patented homespun kind of way, that most computer users adhere to the “all I want to do is push a button” model of complexity management for software application development – which is to say that complexity is dismissed as an accidental attribute of the problem at hand, and that this…